Hello,
I am new here, found this good forum about hdds after searching for MHDD.

My pata laptop hdd decided to start giving me headaches.
It`s a brand new Western Digital 160gb ATA hdd, manufactured January 2009. I bought it from a friend (has no warranty although it`s new, lost it) to put in in my old ata laptop.

Worked well until 5 days ago, when while browsing the web with firefox the hdd led started blinking fast and the system did not respond. After a restart, the system failed to boot (ubuntu 9.04). Tried restoring grub loader, rebuild partitions with gparted, nothing, the hdd led will blink continually.

After reading some post on this forum, I tried MHDD scan. It reported bad sectors in the first 5% sectors of the hdd (a lot of X and brown areas). Tried erasing the HDD but with no luck, it failed after a few sectors giving me a "broken disk" error. Tried running scan again, gave me errors again but it different sectors, still in the first part of the hdd.

I used hdd regenerator then (I know.. you don`t recomend it) and if said it fix some bad clusters, but the program just kept telling me it could not continue because IDE not ready.

In the end what I did was to make with a live cd a blank 8GB partition at the start of the hdd and install Ubuntu after.

The laptop works ok now, the hdd speed is good. Don`t get it, what happend? I did not hit the hdd, etc. After the first 8GB the hdd is good, should I use it like this? Every time I run MHDD I get different X count and brown areas.. strange, shouldn`t it be the same sectors every time?

And one thing, how can I clear the smart data, because ubuntu keeps telling me the hdd has a problem and it`s annyoing.

Thanks for your time!

Are you sure there is no warranty? Should have 3 years from date of manufacture.

Check here http://websupport.wdc.com/warranty/seri ... ty&lang=en

I have checked with the site you gave me and it says it has warranty until 2011. Now I will try to RMA-it, hope it works worldwide.

You are allowed one "out of region" drive per year anyway, so should be OK.

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It says it costs me 140 dollars shipping cost to Germany. Don`t know if they will return the amount back with a new drive, but it does not worth it. I will keep the drive like this, and hope my friend finds the warranty.